How to Increase Internal Storage in Android Smartphone

Internal Storage expansion guide on any Android Device.

We all love our Androids, there’s only thing to disappointing us from time to time — low internal storage. Yup, I know, you have to let go of apps, save pictures and videos to cloud storage, delete old files, etc. We often see this problem with budget phones, where the internal storage is mostly on the lower side. Here is the guide on how to increase internal storage on Android.

And to top it all you have the OS eating up a most of the internal memory. Have you ever think of increase internal storage on your Android device. There is the way to increase internal storage of an Android device by borrowing it from the SD card. Yes, that can be done, but some conditions apply. And that’s the only way really. You can’t just do some magic and get pull extra memory from the air and add it to the device… it has to come from somewhere and external storage is the only saviour here.

Conditions to increase internal storage:

The phone must have support for external storage.

The Android version must be Marshmallow or above.

The SD card used in the process must be a high-speed class 10 SD card. Just a fair point of warning — if you proceed ahead with a slow speed memory card, it might result in your Android slowing down in the long run.

#1. Format the SD card:

First of all, it would be to format the SD card. Make sure that you have taken a backup of the data before you begin the format.

#2. Format as Internal storage:

After the format, go to the Settings > Storage and USB. Depending on your phone specifications, here you will be able to see the free space on your device.

Go to Portable storage and once inside, tap on the upper right corner for options. A menu will pop up showing two options — View and Settings. Tap on Settings.

The Settings menu contain only a handful of options. Our weapon of choice here is the option called Format as Internal storage. This option will erase all the data from the SD card and will pan the SD card as part of the internal memory.

The whole process will approximately take around five minutes to complete, depending on your phone.

Once that’s completed, you will see that the device storage shows a collective of both internal and external memories, with the option for portable storage gone.

So, it’ll take only a few minutes to increase the phone’s internal memory.

As the phone treats the SD card as part of the internal storage, an unexpected ejection may result in misbehaving of the phone and may cause a forceful shutdown of the apps.

However, not all phones compatible with this option, such as the Samsung and Xiaomi devices. So for those devices which haven’t been blessed with this feature, don’t bother, we have a trick to do just that.

Samsung and Xiaomi Devices, Please stand up:

First and foremost, you will be required to enable the USB debugging option in the Developer options and install Android Debugging Bridge (commonly known as the ADB tools) on the computer as well.

To enable the Developer option, open the About page under Android settings and tap on the Build Number 5 times until you see a toast notification stating that the developer options have been turned on.

Once everything has been set up, go to the ADB shell and run the below command.

sm list-disks

Note down the device ID from the command prompt window. So now to use the whole SD card as internal storage, use the below command (xxx,x being the device ID).

sm partition disk:xxx,x private

That’s it, as simple as it can get. Now head over to your device and you’ll be able to see that both the storages have merged and your phone has a delightful higher internal storage.

That’s the Wrap:

So, here’s how you can increase the phone’s memory. We are no magicians and aforementioned, this trick can only be achieved if only your device supports it. So, don’t despair when the ‘low internal storage’ pops up the next time, instead, tackle it using this simple trick.

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